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American author Ernest Hemingway with Pauline, Gregory, John, and Patrick Hemingway and four marlins on the dock in Bimini, 20 July 1935. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The recent HBO film, Hemingway & Gellhorn, Hemingway’s son Patrick said, is “so ludicrous as to be beyond conception.”

Though, he did like Midnight in Paris. “Owen Wilson is what made that film!” he said. He’ll get back to me on the actor who played Hemingway. Perhaps, he doesn’t expect much from Hollywood when it comes to his dad. As Hemingway famously said vis-à-vis dealings with Hollywood, it’s best to rendezvous discreetly at the state line: “You throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.”

He’s had it with the distortions of his dad. In a recent interview, Patrick told the way he was—with refreshing candor. Consider it a birthday present to Hemingway—the master of writing “the way it is”—born 113 years ago today.

Hemingway & Gellhorn, he said, cannot be justified as “a great work of art” like Shakespeare’s Richard III that, in spite of its historical inaccuracy (“Richard III was not the villain!”), lives on as a “good play.” Hemingway & Gellhorn is just plain inaccurate.

For starters, Hemingway did not smoke cigars.

Evidently, Hemingway said, the screenwriters “were fascinated by the Marx brothers” and “the intellectual Groucho who smoked the cigar.” So they reasoned, “If you get an intellectual like Hemingway, then you would smoke a cigar. And, so they have him smoking cigars.”

“Well, the truth,” he said, “is the one health measure Hemingway did follow was never—never—to smoke in any form.” “But, it’s interesting to think that they equate an intellectual with a cigar smoker. That’s their limited point of view.”

Furthermore, as for his drinking, Hemingway said, “He certainly wasn’t as big a drunk as Faulkner or Fitzgerald. They were both truly much more alcoholics than Hemingway ever was!” When he was writing, Hemingway would never drink, working, as Charles Scribner III said in Ernest Hemingway: Wrestling with Life, “like a monk in fasting.”

No matter. The opening scene of Hemingway & Gellhorn has Hemingway, played by Clive Owen, fishing for marlin in Bimini. “Of course, there are wars,” Martha Gellhorn, played by Nicole Kidman, intones as the film cuts to a close-up of Pilar—Key West. Florida. “And, there are wars,” she says, as the camera pans up to a sleeping Hemingway, propped back, holding his fishing pole.

Then, suddenly, he feels a powerful tug and comes to, working mightily to snag the marlin. “Skinner,” the bartender at Sloppy Joes, where Hemingway and Gellhorn would soon meet in December 1936, takes the cigar out of his mouth to pour more liquor down his throat as this seemingly larger-than-life hedonist, known for his machismo and spirit of adventure, goes for the kill. After liquoring Hemingway up, Skinner reinserts the cigar, as Papa continues sucking in needed nicotine and smoke-filled machismo to finish the job, the cigar poised in his mouth just like Groucho. “Everything dies,” Hemingway says as he impales the marlin with great gusto, flowing blood filling the screen.

Critics, Patrick said, were complaining about Hemingway “wasting his time fishing for marlin in Bimini. I think there was even a picture of him in Time Magazine in a striped sailor’s shirt with a rod. The image was of someone goofing off when the rest of the nation was preoccupied with their problems.”